There are 13,000 B&W licenses, not 13,000 B&W sets in use. Some of those people will be people who just never upgraded their license when they got color TV 40 years ago, due either to ignorance or deception, but I bet the vast majority of those B&W licenses (sorry, licences--this is UK after all) are people who just don't want to pay the extra nearly £100 a year for something they're confident the licensing authority won't actually notice.

Back in the day in UK, the licensing authority actually used to drive around in trucks that could detect the magnetic field off CRTs. Back then, they may have actually been able to dell the difference between a color set and a B&W one, but with the rise of CRT-based computer monitors and later new monitor technology that doesn't give off a huge magnetic signature, they had to abandon the practice.

Ok. Is this license the government equivalent of cable over there, or is there simply a fee to have a television and use it?

It's basically a tax to help fund public broadcasting.

For example, the BBC is commercial-free because their operating budget is paid by the government through collection of the television tax.

If you watch programming as it is broadcast, you have to pay for the license.

However, if your TV isn't connected to cable or an antenna, and used only for a video game system, or a DVD player, or any non-live form of viewing, you don't have to pay for a license.

I was hoping they were rebroadcasting the entire run, perhaps after successfully recovering all of the video from every show. I was further hoping they'd realize their prices for the dvd sets are atrocious and release them for $20 a season.

Seriously?

With all the reconstruction and restoration the classic serials from the 60s and 70s take, you expect them to be 20 bucks per season?

Not to mention that a season of Classic Who from Hartnell's era was usually 50 episodes or so, since they didn't really have weeks off for the first couple years?

To be fair, with as many episodes that are missing, a full season might actually be $20 worth.

moel:FirstNationalBastard: However, if your TV isn't connected to cable or an antenna, and used only for a video game system, or a DVD player, or any non-live form of viewing, you don't have to pay for a license.

Not true...

THE ONLY point at which you no longer have to pay for a licence, is if the devices in question does not contain ANY kind of tuner.

Does this include NTSC tuners?

I mean I'm all for reasonable enforcement, but if I were to move to England and take my TV with me, I'd be f%$#ing pissed if they wanted to charge me a TV license fee when the damn thing can't view anything the country broadcasts.

Jaws_Victim:Gotcha. I guess that makes sense. Tv is free in the us but you pay for public broadcasting through taxes. The uk is just way more transparent and you only pay if you use it. Seems pretty expensive though.

It's not so bad: the BBC provides some pretty high-quality programming for a not-unreasonable fee.

Yeah, the show was a lot more fun when they didn't feel obligated to make the Doctor even remotely sympathetic, or even particularly the protagonist in the first place.

profplump:erik-k: Any and every antenna is both a receiver and transmitter, and they picked up the radio signals scattered off the antennas.

So what you're saying is there's no way to detect the chroma capabilities of the receiver, even if you accept the fuzzy detection of "a receiver" as evidence of a television (which people trying to avoid the fee should not in the first place, as the difference between "antenna" and "bits of wire" is nothing more than orientation).

The difference between an antenna and bits of wire is a sharply tuned absorption character, as opposed to random absorption and scattering. Otherwise your antenna wouldn't be able to pick up radio waves, or possibly your wall sockets would be playing every radio station in range.

You can actually tell the difference by doing a frequency sweep with an imager, if you really care enough to do so. Whether you can tell color or not off the absorption characteristics of the antenna is sort of a matter of how the three color signals are carried, if they're just three regularly spaced image signals the distinction would actually be pretty obvious.

erik-k:Van Eck phreaking has never been demonstrated working at more than half-soccer-field range to my knowledge.

What he was describing was essentially the precursor to wardriving, you'd only need, what, 50 to 100 feet or so of range, on average? Not like they'd be terribly worried about a few false negatives from the people with houses deeper than a soccer field, those people probably have no qualms about paying the license.